FoodShare

Ugly looking vegetable this celeriac. Who would have thought that you could mash it up with onion, carrot, parsley, thyme and anything else you like to make a delicious, light side dish. I wouldn't have known this had I not tasted the most delicious concoction ever made last week at FoodShare's "Recipe for Change" fundraising event. 26 chefs preparing tasting plates beyond expectations and imagination. My winner for the night was the glazed beach mushrooms with celery mash and beet/yellow pepper sauce from Calico Cafe, hubby was partial to the cornish hen and tarragon ravioli from Quince.

Thanks to FoodShare for a wonderful, well organized event, and for the great work they do all year round. If you haven't heard of it, FoodShare is a Toronto-based non-profit whose vision is "Good, Healthy Food for all". They work to connect people back to their food supply, teach kids about growing, making and eating healthy food, and get good food to vulnerable people.

The message certainly resonated with me since just that day, my 4 year old daughter wondered aloud why she always has to take a healthy snack to kindergarten while the kid who sits beside her gets to bring Smarties every day. Gives me an idea for a long term goal to work towards - implementing a kindergarten healthy snack program at the school. This might take awhile, but be patient with me, I'm still working on the small steps!

Links:
Calico Cafe -fresh, veg/vegan, near Bloor and Dufferin http://www.calicocafe.ca
Quince - Mediterranean food near Yonge and Eg http://www.quincerestaurant.ca
FoodShare - http://www.foodshare.net

Large leaps to complexity

Large leaps to complexity. That was my husband's joke right from the beginning. Anytime I made a non-green choice I was teased with this line. But I think this time we're truly guilty of it. You could also call it hypocrisy. Or, if you're feeling kind, compromise.

Here's the thing: we bought a new vehicle and it's a beast. Okay, so it's not a Hummer or anything, but it's not a tiny hybrid either. It's a minivan.

We have survived with a tiny Saturn for 10 years. It was easy on gas, had enough seats for us as we added more people, and it got us where we needed to go. Last summer, however, we discovered some major vehicular shortfalls. We decided the kids were old enough for camping but realized that packing for trips became tests of human ingenuity. This winter we also realized that we couldn't fit both ice skates and toboggans in the trunk. Surmountable? Absolutely. Pain in the ass? Oh yeah.

We have vowed for years that our next car would be a hybrid. But used hybrids are hard to find. And they're still not cheap. The fact of the matter is that we're hard on our vehicles. I have a tendency to scrape them in underground parking garages, my kids tend to accumulate apple cores, goldfish crackers and sand inside, and my husband spills alot of coffee. It's hard to justify buying something expensive when 1) we don't drive too much, 2) we will make it look 10 years old in a matter of weeks. We opted for a cheaper, 4 year old, gas guzzling van with AC, tinted window, power locks, and an automatic starter.

Simplicity? Absolutely not. Right choice for us? Unfortunately, yes.

Veg meal, Veg brain

I cracked my head today, hard. Since then I've been in a bit of a confused fog. I'm having trouble finding my words today. But I did the veggie thing for real today. I made the following veggie meal. It's cheap and healthy and it tastes okay (like pretty much everything, it's tastier if you add hot sauce). Best part is that it's easy enough to cook while suffering from mild concussion.

It's apparently a variation of something called "Louvia me Lehana". Not sure the origins.

3 cups dried black-eyed peas
water
2 onions, chopped
5 garlic cloves, minced
1 cup fresh dill, chopped
1 cup fresh parsley, chopped
2 fresh tomatoes, diced
2 tablespoons tomato paste
4 tablespoons olive oil
salt

Soak the peas overnight(if not using canned ones). Rinse and then boil them in a pot for 45 minutes. Drain them.
In another pot put the olive oil and the onion. Stir and cook for 2-3 minutes. Then add the garlic, the tomatoes, the tomato paste, the parsley and the dill. Let them cook in medium heat for 30 minutes. Add some salt.
Add the peas to the sauce, mix and cook in low heat for 15 minutes. Serve with pita.

Almost Veg Night #1

I had four kids here for dinner tonight instead of the usual two. So, as always when I don't know what to cook, I made eggs. Free range, organic ones, and sold in cardboard not plastic containers. They each got an egg, some organic cherry tomatoes, cheese and a piece of flax toast...and a kooky "potato pancake" I made to use up leftovers. The eggs were a hit except for the yolks. My "reuse the leftovers" plan failed though, because the "pancakes" were not. Me and my husband had fancy omelettes with onion, tomato, olives, and feta with an organic green salad topped with sprouts. Healthy veggie meal number one.

Okay, okay. I'm lying. I had a pack of bacon in the fridge. So we had that too. The kids gobbled it up in about 2.5 seconds...well at least they gobbled up what they could wrestle away from me and my husband. It's just as well because now it's gone and I'm sure clean bacon (if it exists) costs about as much as my house. I'll do better tomorrow.

Farewell my salty friend.

Mmmmmeat?

This month I'm teaching about the economics of food and the issues of industrial agriculture. I have to put that out there so you know that I'm not just a glutton for punishment. I wouldn't have chosen "Frankensteer" as my Thursday viewing if I didn't need to preview it for work.
I eat meat. I like eating meat.

I tried vegetarianism for 4 years during university. I didn't eat meat but I didn't eat chickpeas or kidney beans or leafy greens either. I mostly ate cheese pizza. Even then, I had a real problem with Swiss Chalet chicken, the problem being I couldn't resist it. But the real breaking point of my flirtation with vegetarianism came when I met my carnivorous husband. It wasn't much of a challenge for him to break my habit. He easily wore me down by cooking bbq ribs and steak. I haven't really looked back. Until recently.

My Thursday night documentary is one you'll want to avoid. You probably already know that from its title. That is, unless you've got alot of money burning a hole in your pocket or a strong but latent urge to eat more lentils. Frankensteer is about growth hormones, antibiotics, carnivorous cows, feedlots, and feces. Having viewed it already, it's too late for me. As soon as it was done, I got onto the internet and found the shop not too far from here that sells meat from nearby Mennonite and Amish farms and immediately placed an order. No antibiotics, no hormones. No massive feedlots as far as the eye can see. You can check it out at http://freshfromthefarm.ca.

As with most of my small steps, this one is not cheap. But I've got a plan. Continue to eat meat, but only the clean stuff. And use way less of it. Tonight we had our drug free chicken souvlaki. It was delicious. We treated it like gold and couldn't afford to overeat. This week, in the interest of preventing bankruptcy, I'm going to cook meatless at least twice.
Fingers crossed that I'll get more creative than cheese pizza. Take pity on me and post your faves.

Oh, and if after all that you still want to watch the doc, you can find it at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4129902081038592146#

Perfectly Packaged

Is organic milk better for us and the planet? Is it worth the extra money? Despite a couple of weeks of cursory research, the answer to these question remains foggy to me. The bias is so intense around this issue that it's next to impossible to find a conclusive reason to drink or not drink organic milk. Harmony Organics claims that it tastes sweeter and cleaner than conventional milk. They also claim their cows are treated "with love and respect", like "members of the family". Is that worth up to double the price?

I'm not totally convinced that organic milk itself is worth the extra cash. But when I found it in reusable glass bottles, I was sold. Given my quest to reduce plastics in my life, the shiny glass bottles sang to me about simplicity. When I was a kid, we used to visit our relatives in a small town in Northern Ireland. These bottles reminded me of the wonder I felt there when I discovered that a real live milkman actually picked up and delivered small bottles of milk at the end of the lane. It was like a time machine. Now I've found the next best thing. Harmony tells us that they reuse the bottles about 15-20 times. Sounds good to me. For now, that makes it worth the hefty $3.49/L. Lucky one of my kids hates milk!

Guilt Free Valentine

This weekend, when I came downstairs I found a shiny foil paper trail leading me to my chocolate smeared children. We needed a junk food antidote; we would bake healthy Valentines muffins instead of the sugar cookies I was planning.

We made mini muffins and decorated them with icing hearts. Other than the icing, they were Healthy (note the capital H). My kids proclaimed them yummy, and ate 4 each. The success ended quickly as my daughter decided that the blueberries looked black and she didn’t want to eat black food. And then she reminded my son that he’s scared of the dark, and dark is black so he should be scared of the blueberries. But still, about a week’s worth of goodness had already been consumed by then, so I consider it a success. And I got to eat the rest, so it works for me. In fact, I was scarfing down the last muffin when I had to stop myself to take its picture (it’s actually only half a muffin, that’s why I had to hold it up)

This is my recipe. As with anything I cook, the measurements tend to be inexact, but they’re muffins, so you can pretty much put in anything you want.

1 ½ c Whole wheat flour

½ c Wheat bran

¼ c Flax seeds (whole seeds)

¼ c Wheat germ

¼ c oats

½ tsp Baking powder

½ tsp Baking soda

½ tsp Cinnamon

¼ tsp Nutmeg

½ c White Sugar (a bit more if you’d like a sweet muffin, mine were not super sweet)

¼ tsp Salt

1 Egg

1 cup Milk

3 tbsp Oil

½ c Grated carrots

2 Grated apples

handful of Blueberries (unless you’re scared of the dark)

handful of walnuts

Mix the wet stuff together in one bowl. Mix the dry stuff together in another bowl. Mix it all together. Bake at 350 for about 15 mins. Once cooled, try to shove muffins down the throats of your loved ones and eat the rest yourself.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Sweet Valentine

Do you remember Valentine’s Day at school? My memories go something like this:
1) Tape paper bag to your desk.
2) Deposit paper cards into the bags of your friends.
3) Cross your fingers that someone puts some cards into your bag.
4) Bliss, as you open the bag later in the day and find, in fact, that you are not a big loser and you actually got a bunch of cards.

Okay, so a couple of things have changed since then. First, I was given a list of the names of all the kids at daycare so I could make sure we sent one for each kid. In this day in age, everyone gets a card from everyone. The second change is that most cards come with candy. So you can substitute steps 3 and 4 above with:
3) Cross you fingers that you get good candy.
4) Bliss, as you open the bag and find it full of chocolate and gummy hearts.

Damn, it’s hard to be a minimalist these days. It’s not that I hate holidays, really I don’t. I just don’t like commercial frenzy. I get it, as a generation of parents, we have a lot of guilt about daycare, work, self indulgence, and not having time, inclination or skills to make homemade stuff. Collectively we’re easy marketing targets, our kids are even more so since they've been marketed to since birth. I just hate to fall into that trap.

I wanted us to make home made cards this year. I think we ended up with two lovely ones but two scribbled all over in black marker, so in the end I sent the kids to school and daycare with a total of 46 garden variety store bought cards. But I put my foot down when it came to adding in Smarties or heart shaped lollipops. I admit to some anxiety about failing on both sides (ie. not being a crafty mom, but not sending candy either) but I did feel some relief when I noticed my kids didn’t know or care who gave them the candy, they were too busy eating it.

I felt way better when I saw how excited my daughter was about making breakfast in bed for me and her dad (one on each day of the weekend). That's the spirit grasshopper!

Can you smell the burnout?

Ok, I’m losing steam already. I’m feeling a like a bit of a eco-freak at work. I’m also starting to feel a bit smelly since the renewed effort to break the anti-perspirant habit (it’s only been 3 days).

The last few weeks have made me realize how entrenched our dependence is on this chemical/plastic/consumer lifestyle. I’m starting to get the feeling that even if I lived like a hermit off the grid in the bush somewhere, I’d somehow end up exposed to chemical fallout. I watched a documentary yesterday about the environmental impacts of Alberta’s tar sands. Interviews with people from the remote community of Fort Chipewyan indicated alarmingly high rates of rare cancers and increasing numbers of deformities in fish. Studies support their anecdotal findings. Their waters are becoming increasingly polluted by contaminants in tailings ponds and emissions from the oil sands. So, this idea of “living off the land” as a safe alternative is probably just an illusion.

Normally, I’d just pack it all in right about now, switch back to anti-perspirant, give “normal” birthday gifts and indulge in some cheezies to make me feel better. At heart, I’m a quitter – but I hate doing it publicly. So, I’ll keep on smelling like patchouli and sweat, and serve my kids organic broccoli, chard and tamari with noodles instead of the frozen pizza I feel like throwing into the oven.

And tonight I’ll avoid any informative programming and watch a few episodes Modern Family because sometimes choosing ignorance is way more fun.

Yellow = Green?

I got an email from my brother-in-law this week about how to opt out of receiving the paper copy of the Yellow Pages. I added it to my to-do list but just one day later received a shiny new copy in the mail. Feeling guilty for not acting more quickly, I immediately opted out for next year before I could forget again. On closer inspection, however, I realized my shiny new copy was the CANPAGES, not the Yellow Pages. I don’t use one directory, never mind two! So I decided to opt out of CanPages too…but alas, it’s not so simple. Seems the best you can do is to go to the this website and send them an email. http://www.canpages.ca/feedback.do?dispatch=init&act=121&lang=0 I’ll let you know next year if it actually works.

If you too want to opt out of Yellow Pages, they make it easy. You just go to http://www.ypg.com/delivery and check off all the things you don’t want.

Little cupboard of horrors

It’s Friday night. I should have watched some dumb romantic comedy or at least a good thriller. But instead, I got sucked into a horror movie. It’s not what you think, it wasn’t a blood and guts horror. It was a documentary.

The information wasn’t new to me, it wasn’t really shocking, but it still cut to hear it all put together like this. “The Disappearing Male” chronicles the effects of chemicals like Phthalates and Bisphenol A on the future of our species. Both are endocrine disrupters which a growing body of evidence is finding to be responsible for skyrocketing male infertility, reduced proportion of male babies, higher rates of miscarriage and male genital birth defects.

BPA has been big in the news in the last couple of years. It makes clear plastics hard and shatterproof. It was the culprit in the big baby bottle recall a couple of years ago. Aside from mimicking estrogen and disrupting male sexual function and development, it is linked to breast and prostate cancer, thyroid disruption, and heart disease. It’s used in a lot more than baby bottles. It’s known to leach from the linings of cans and plastic bottles and it’s used in pretty much everything made of clear plastic. According to the doc, more than a staggering seven billion pounds of BPA are produced each year worldwide.

Phthalates are plasticizers. They make plastics flexible and soft. They are found in personal care products, toys, linings of tin cans, PVC shower curtains and medical supplies. It’s hard to know how to avoid phthalates because they are not labeled. In cosmetics and detergents they are usually contained in the generic term “fragrance”. They make our hair shiny, they bind to perfumes to make us smell good and clean. But I’m starting to wake up to the fact that they are actually very dirty.

What can I do? Well, I’ve already pretty much stopped buying anything that contains fragrance, I got rid of our PVC shower curtain, I’m more careful about soap. But I’ve got to wonder if what is in my mattress, my drinking water, my laminate floors? This requires more research. Added to list. Today my step is to make a conscious effort is to use fewer cans (gotta learn how to soak beans) and to remove the waterproof mattress covers from my kids’ beds.

This doc had me feeling ill, and on the edge of my plastic seat, trying not to breathe or touch anything. But knowing that more people are watching it, that the issue is becoming mainstream, gives me some hope. Check out “The Disappearing Male”. It airs on CBC on Valentine’s Day (it does give us reason to appreciate maleness I suppose). It can be viewed online at http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/2008/disappearingmale/index.html.

WARNING: Not suitable for anyone wishing to continue living under IIB. (Ignorance is Bliss).

Wine and Butterflies

The "stay-cation" was great. We smell like chlorine, look like prunes, and have watched enough Treehouse to make up for all our cable-free living thus far. Great Wolf Lodge is everything I expected, the good and the bad. Certainly not the place for peace and quiet, but we managed to find that when we visited the Butterfly Conservatory. In my humble opinion it is an excellent antidote to the cheese of Niagara Falls. Very peaceful, well maintained, informative -heaven for geeks like me and my daughter. Husband and son were slightly glazed. After watching the required video introduction, my daughter suggested that we plant a butterfly garden this summer. I added it to my "to-do" list. Any gardeners out there with suggestions beyond "butterfly bush"? I guess I'll have to add "research butterfly garden" to the list as well.

Malivoire winery, definitely worth checking it out. Our "guide" explained all about their growing practices (all pesticide free, and quite alot of certified organic) and those of other Niagara wineries that are into sustainability. He suggested we check out Southbrook vineyards where they are using biodynamic farming (some sort of holistic farming method that "goes beyond organic"). That's for our next trip. As you can imagine, one wine tasting stop was one too many for kids all pumped up about heading to a waterpark. Anyway, all in all, we made it home with a case of local, pesticide free, and certified organic wines. Okay, a case minus a few bottles...

Cheers.